Cutting-edge SEO advice for beginners

5 min reading
26 July 2016
Cutting-edge SEO advice for beginners
Cutting-edge SEO advice for beginners

BBVA API Market

One of the most important roles in the online market is the search engine optimizer or SEO. This role involves the formal and technical aspects of packaging content for search engines, such as Google, so that pages achieve the best positioning in particular searches. They play a key part in attracting traffic to a project

In this article, we provide a brief list of practical advice for people starting out in this field: An SEO guide.

Content, content, content… but how?

The first rule of good positioning is to develop original and creative content that adds value, providing an effective response to demands for information in a particular search. But content is not enough in its own. In addition to the ideas and thoughts in the text, we also need to respect a number of structural HTML-scripting factors. HTML tasks to make a page more attractive to searches are known as SEO OnPage: the site’s pages must have a metatitle, a metadescription, an h1, a number of h2s and some h3s. This is a way of structuring and ordering content, and making keywords relevant for positioning. Using our keywords in the text is also essential.

The canonical url is an important HTML detail. Specific pages on some sites can be accessed from various links, and, logically, this affects how Google indexes these pages. Using canonical urls removes this ambiguity. It is an SEO best practice that helps search engines enormously by cutting out noise. HTML tag in the <head>: 

      <link rel=”canonical” href=”colocar aquí la url canonical” />

It is very unusual to come across any digital projects with SEO advice that ignore these SEO OnPage elements nowadays. Most pages have well structured HTML, with all of the elements clearly marked using tags. Therefore, competitive advantages must be sought through other relevant aspects, particularly in the new mobile era, such as, for example, page-loading times (Web Performance Optimization or WPO): poor load times can penalize page positioning.

In the medium to longer term, another important factor for search rankings will be the transition from the current HTTP protocol to the secure HTTPS protocol

Building a site with authority for Google

No website will be well positioned if Google does not think its content is of interest for a particular search. The main – and practically only – purpose of its search engine is to serve the best possible information for each search. If it believes a site meets this purpose, its positioning will be stronger: if not, its positioning will be worse.

How does a site obtain greater authority for a search or searches? Links are of particular importance. There are two sorts of links: internal links among the site’s own content; and external links from other information sources. Tasks relating to links are known as linkbuilding, one of the keys roles for an SEO. You cannot achieve strong positioning for a site’s pages without good links. 

Aspects of internal links to be addressed by an SEO:  

– The information architecture. By working on internal links between the pages of their sites, SEOs can achieve two objectives: improving the positioning of pages that are already ranked; and improving the positioning of those that are not ranked, but which are important for the company’s business goals. The site’s information architecture must facilitate accessibility to the content in a way that meets these objectives. This can be achieved by designing a menu that fosters this accessibility (there is no need for hundreds of links – it is a case of prioritizing the content you want Google to find); and creating a good crosslinking system that promotes the positioning of some pages over others (seeking to link the least important to the most prominent on a particular topic to create a harmonious whole and foster selective positioning). 

– Pay attention to linkjuice: linkjuice is a process through which the pages of a site give authority and positioning to other pages through an architecture of internal links. One common strategy is to promote a number of landing pages on the site (pages for subscription-conversion, registration or purchase of a product or service or a themed content tag for the media), using internal links that point to one page from other landing pages containing similar information content, with the words used in the link matching the search terms (anchor text). Google searches and interprets what we understand so that the page has greater authority than others for a particular search. This is important so that pages with masses of content concentrate, rather than dilute, the force of this authority. This avoids the dreaded cannibalization by the site’s own content. 

– Technical aspects are key: having some technical knowledge and understanding of search tools is essential for detecting which pages have authority, and which haven’t but would benefit from having it. One such tool is Google Search Console, this provides specific reports through Traffic search > Internal links. The other main approach is studying the site’s log: this provides information on indexing, problems with the page’s HTTP (404 errors, 301 and 302 redirections, etc.), etc. There are a number of very useful free tools for this, such as ScreamingFrog

Aspects of external links to be addressed by an SEO: 

– All external links are recommended: the more the merrier. When an external site links to one of your project’s page, Google interprets this as meaning that the content of this landing page is reliable for users. And if these links come directly from your competitors, so much the better. 

– Strategies for achieving external links that are not very natural are mistaken. However, there are a number of suggestions: improve your content to attract more attention; seek agreements with other information sources; use directories, social networks, aggregators, broken linkbuilding (search for broken links on other websites and propose your content to resolve the issue), etc. The best way is always to rely on quality content and wait for your site to naturally attract backlinks.    

Adapting to the mobile era

Nobody can now say that content consumption on mobile devices is the future of the internet: it is already the present. This is one of the reasons why Google gives so much importance to page loading times (WPO) and why it has launched its new AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) service for searches on mobile devices: most of the world’s media has already got on board with this. With AMP HTML, Google has revolutionized the programming focus for WPO. This is extended HTML featuring Google’s special AMP properties, in which standard HTML tags are modified by AMP tags, serving content directly to the user from Google’s cache: 

<!doctype html>

<html ⚡>
    <head>
          <meta charset=”utf-8″>
         <link rel=”canonical” href=”hello-world.html”>
         <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,minimum-scale=1,initial-scale=1″>
        <style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;-moz-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;-ms-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both}@-webkit-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-moz-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-ms-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-o-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}</style><noscript><style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:none;-moz-animation:none;-ms-animation:none;animation:none}</style></noscript>
           <script async src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js”></script>
     </head>
 <body>Hello World!</body>
</html> 

The important question now is how to transition from designing for PCs to designing for the mobile era, without impacting load times. Google is providing its own solution through AMP. However, there are a number of more widespread options,  such as responsive design (which offers many WPO advantages but also a number of problems), a mobile version of, or alternative, to dynamic serving. 

Good user experience (UX) metrics, an asset

Google has its own search engine, its Chrome browser and the Google Analytics analysis tool, which is widely implemented across the online market. It is one question to think that Google accesses user metrics to use the time on the page or the reload time to position pages, and a very different question to think that its search engine never uses them. Google recognizes that it uses them on some occasions, and the scores for these metrics must therefore be optimal. And it is logical to think this will be the case when Google is so interested in the user experience or WPO. 

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